Tag: Finishing Line Press

I’m excited to share the news that my poetry chapbook, Speak, Cairn, will be published by Finishing Line Press in March 2018. Starting today, you can pre-order the book from the Finishing Line Press bookstore.

The book takes the reader on a trip through a variety of natural landscapes (boreal forest by canoe, fruit-tree planting in an equatorial eco-city, soaking in mineral baths in Montana).

The reader connects with people along the way who are rooted in the place the reader travels through. The reader continues to move, feeling moments of connection, but mostly alien and lost.

The collection is book-ended by two poems concerning cairns, markers on a trail that show people where to go. As alone as we may feel as we travel through the world looking for home, when we add a stone to a cairn, we are connected to our fellow travelers. “We speak to each other through stones.”

The final poem, “Hobo’s Song,” says, “We kneel before the world’s brokenness,/a puzzle that will never be finished./We build to repair, to make whole,/to connect the pieces, stone by stone.” As much as our human world is broken and each traveler alone, poems can reconnect us to each other and to the earth, like a human-made stack of stones.

Thank you so much to my friends, family, teachers, and Finishing Line Press for the love and support.